Coinmap Launches A New Version With Added Features

Despite its popularity the website has never really changed, and had a very clunky user experience, making it frustrating to use and ugly to look at. That has now changed with the release of Coinmap 2.0 by Satoshi Labs, an umbrella company for several bitcoin businesses. The new update comes with a total revamp of the website’s design and functionality.

The old website was a simple hack of OpenStreetMap. The new website has been rebuilt to have a sleek and modern design, it features a heat map of bitcoin businesses when zoomed out, and individual merchants when zoomed in closer. They have also added numerous new features, including reviews and a search tool.

Following the new update people can give businesses a rating of 1-5 stars, as well as add comments to the merchant’s map profile. Merchants don’t need to make an account at OpenStreetMap to post or edit their business on the map, which is now optimized for mobile devices.

Perhaps, the biggest feature is the new search capability. Prior to this update you could not search for businesses,  now you can do so with text or through categories, such as nightlife, restaurants, and cafe. Besides businesses you can also find and search for bitcoin atms, so you can easily buy or sell Bitcoin. Lastly, with new accounts people are able to ‘like’ businesses which then show up in a column of their profile, working as a bookmark for your favorite bitcoin businesses.

Supercharging the service is a new API, it now can be included into other projects and apps.

A weekend project

Though it served a great need in the bitcoin community, an easy way to find brick and mortar business that accept bitcoin, and was part of an already established company, the project has seen little maintenance. Coinmap was originally created over a weekend by Satoshi Labs’ led developer, Pavol Rusnak, who also goes by the online username Stick. He saw how useful the service could be to the bitcoin community, but due to his duties at Satoshi Labs, he didn’t have much time to spend on it.

Only recently, with the help of a new hire, was the bitcoin startup able to devote some time to the project. According to Satoshi Labs, this was due to Stick’s “100 percent” focus on Trezor Wallet, the company’s hardware bitcoin wallet. Trezor is one of the most popular wallets out there and the startup’s main product. Its security is paramount, as if it fails thousands of people’s bitcoin could be stolen. So Stick’s neglect of Coinmap is understandable.

Long before Coinmap, Stick also helped with the creation of a bitcoin mining pool, called Slush – another project of the Satoshi Labs family and named after the pseudonym of its creator, Marek Palatinus. The startup claims it was first digital currency mining pool. Stick helps actively run and maintain the pool so any free time he did have was being put to use to another project.

With the new help, the future of Coinmap looks bright, and currently boasts over 6,500 bitcoin accepting businesses. The company has not said whether they will be dedicating regular time to improving the app, but that they will be developing it periodically.

The map, alongside other enterprises, is representative of the small company’s ongoing efforts to support and grow the bitcoin economy. Based in Prague, Czech Republic, the bitcoin development company have built numerous products, but is perhaps best known for its open sourced hardware wallet – Trezor. The company is entirely self-funded and has been instrumental in making bitcoin storage easy and simple, and helping bitcoin adoption in Europe.